Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one. Life is good in Los Angeles... it's paradise on Earth. That's what they tell you, anyway.
These opening lines introduce us to the Los Angeles of the 1950s, the setting for one of the greatest noir films the world had seen in a very long time. These opening lines are juxtaposed over picture postcards and an ideological view of the city of angels that the press is trying to sell. But the reality is introduced immediately afterwards as we see Mickey Cohen’s arrest, are introduced to the power vacuum that it creates, and are told that all of this is “off the record, on the Q.T., and very hush-hush.” What an introduction to a film. I would be hard-pressed to remember another film that had sold me on its concept so effectively and so fully in just a first few minutes. The screenplay, penned by Brian Helgeland and director Curtis Hanson, based on the novel by James Ellroy, won the Academy Award, and the reason why is apparent right out the gate. This is going to be a taught, complicated film with complex morals and characters that are not what they seem right up front. This could have easily been the frontrunner for Best Picture were it not for the behemoth that was Titanic. No one was going to stop that ship from sailing off with it all in 1997.
L. A. Confidential introduced me to two things: the combined talents of Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe, two Australian actors who are impeccably hiding their accents, and cynicism in entertainment. That last one is an interesting thing for me to examine from my personal perspective because cynicism is hardly a new thing in the movies. It was especially rampant in the 1970s with films like The French Connection cashing in on a lead character who is almost as bad as the people he hunts. Likewise, a film like Easy Rider is such a dour and depressing look at counter-culture that it can come across as a pessimistic view on life and the pursuit of personal freedoms. The 1970s were less than twenty years in the past when L. A. Confidential hit the theaters and gave us a look at narcissism and police corruption in 1950s L. A. Here we have three leads, all of them police officers and all of them tread heavily into a moral quandary in their own ways, doing things that are, or soon will be, illegal, each with their own motives and rationalizations.
The first one we are introduced to is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Bud is described as a thug and that reputation has some merit. It’s the way his captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) sees him and will utilize him to intimidate and beat people for his own reasons. Bud has a soft spot for abused women that stems from his own experiences as a child being tied to a radiator and forced to watch his father beat his mother to death with a tire iron. When we are introduced to Bud, he is scoping out a home where a man is beating on his wife. Bud provokes the man into taking a swing at him, beats him brutally, then leaves him handcuffed to his porch to await the uniforms who are on their way over to arrest him. This will be a key trait for Bud who loses his cool over the kind of abuse some women endure by the hands of their spouses.
Bud is partners with Detective Sergeant Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel), an older officer who has a problem with alcohol. One evening leading up to Christmas, some Mexicans are brought in and arrested. Word is these men were responsible for two officers being in the hospital—a story that gets more exaggerated the more it is told—and when Stensland hears they are being booked, he comes after them and instigates an assault that ends up involving several other officers. The assault is captured on camera by the press, is dubbed “Bloody Christmas,” and the public demands something be done about this.
Edmund Exley (Guy Pierce) is a relatively young officer who is pulling duty as the watch commander so that the veteran officers can enjoy their Christmas party. When the violence breaks out, he tries to intervene and ends up getting locked behind a door, unable to prevent anything. When the smoke clears and the higher-ups are looking for someone to testify against their fellow officers, Exley readily volunteers his testimony, offering a way for the police to shift the blame to officers near their retirement but putting the brunt of the blame on Stensland, who gets fired. Exley suggests Bud White also be thrown under the bus, but that suggestion is ignored as Captain Dudley Smith finds him too valuable for his specific set of skills. In exchange for his testimony, Exley is offered a promotion to Lieutenant, which he talks up to Detective Lieutenant, working alongside men who will hate him for testifying against their friends and co-workers.
The third officer is Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). Known as Hollywood Jack, Vincennes is the consulting officer on a detective television show, which has given him a taste for the limelight. On top of this, he takes payoffs from a slimy tabloid writer, Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), to arrest celebrities for a number of crimes, including drugs and homosexuality, all while making sure Sid is there to get the pictures to fuel his subscriber base. Jack justifies these bribes as harmless, since these celebrities were guilty and should be arrested anyway, so he might as well profit from it. Jack was involved in the assault on the Mexicans, which resulted in him being suspended from the show, hitting him in his ego. Eventually, he will begin questioning his actions and even why he became a cop in the first place.
Into all of this is the recent arrest of Mickey Cohen. There is the influx of criminals wanting to take over the drug empire. Dudley utilizes Bud White as muscle to convince any of these would-be gangsters that it isn’t worth their lives to try to take over the racket in L.A. Shortly after Dick Stensland is fired, a robbery and mass murder happen at the Night Owl Cafe, leaving behind many bodies including Stensland’s. Also in that mix is high-class prostitute Susan Lefferts (Amber Smith). Bud White had previously seen her along with a former police officer and another woman, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger).
He tracks Lynn down and discovers the two women were part of a larger prostitution ring known as Fleur-de-Lis, run by wealthy businessman Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn). The investigation gets more and more complicated as it becomes obvious that the murders at the Night Owl Cafe—murders pinned on some young black men who were soon afterwards killed trying to escape the police—were not just some random act of violence but an attempt to shut down something involved in the vacated drug ring. It begins to look like it could all come back to the police and one individual on the inside who has more than altruistic reasons to want to keep people from taking over the racket.
There are no innocent characters in this film, which is one of the reasons why this is such a great movie. It’s all too easy to write an officer who is honest to a fault, willing to do whatever it takes within the boundaries of the law to bring down the criminal element; some one akin to Dick Tracy. Guys like that are a dime a dozen in classic noir films and rarely make for interesting characters. It is this exact cliché that gets us early on when we are introduced to Ed Exley. He sells himself as being just such a character, especially when he is pushing for his promotion to the detective bureau. Captain Smith challenges this aspiration by presenting a series of questions designed to test whether Exley would break the law or plant evidence to get a conviction or kill a criminal to ensure they do not get away on a technicality. Each of these things Exley denies he will ever do, and each one of them will eventually be broken.
Exley’s a politician at heart. He uses Bloody Christmas as an opportunity to propel himself into the spotlight and advance his own career at the expense of others. He’s smart and knows how to manipulate those around him, but he secretly wants to be a little more like Bud White, as evidenced by when he takes advantage of the situation between Bud and Lynn Bracken, taking her to bed knowing that she is seeing Bud. These two officers may seem like they are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but when they finally team up in the second half of the film, they work together like clockwork.
Jack Vincennes’ crisis of conscience is what brings him into the overall mix. One of Sid Hudgen’s setups leads to a young gay actor being murdered. When the powers that be have no interest in solving the crime, Jack turns to Exley, believing what Exley is looking into is tied somehow into his case. Jack unwittingly, and unfortunately, discovers the identity of the mastermind and it gets him killed, but not before he uses the only opportunity he has left to plant some false information that will get back to Exley and expose the truth. Jack’s sudden demise is abrupt and one of the most disturbing and surprising moments in this picture, and Kevin Spacey, proving that he is capable of nuance, knocks it out of the park. Spacey kind of shifted into cruise control in more recent years with his performances, right up until a major scandal derailed his career, but in the 90s, he was on fire.
This film goes a lot of surprising places in the course of unraveling this mystery. It’s complicated enough that if you are not paying close attention, you can easily get lost in all of the details. But it never cheats; everything you need to figure things out is there on some level, even if it is just a brief moment that makes you dislike someone who will turn out to be a villain. This script won the Oscar for a reason. It is so nuanced and well-written with complicated characters who each, in their own ways, will betray their true selves in the course of the story. This film is a bit on the long side, but it needs every minute of its runtime; there are no unnecessary scenes. Roger Ebert said that a great film is one that has at least three good scenes and no bad ones, and that describes L.A. Confidential perfectly.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Arnon Milchan, Curtis Hanson, and Michael Nathanson
Best Director: Curtis Hanson
Best Supporting Actress: Kim Basinger (won)
Best Screenplay - Based on Material Previously Produced or Published: Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson (won)
Best Art Direction: Jeannine Oppewall and Jay Hart
Best Cinematography: Dante Spinotti
Best Film Editing: Peter Honess
Best Original Dramatic Score: Jerry Goldsmith
Best Sound: Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer, and Kirk Francis
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Release Date: September 19, 1997
Running Time: 138 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, and Danny DeVito
Directed By: Curtis Hanson
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